Northern Oak has been an incredible experience, having toured across the UK and created music that has gone beyond borders, delighting ears as far as Australia and Japan. None of this could have happened without your help, for which we are eternally grateful.

2016 will mark the 10 year anniversary of the band, but it is the last 5 years with the current members which have been the defining line up for the band, and we feel that the different musical backgrounds of the current members has been one of our key strengths. Sadly it has come to a stage where not all members are able to continue, and so we have taken the decision to disband in 2016.

We will be performing a farewell tour across February and March to celebrate what has been a glorious journey and we hope to see friends, old and new, there one last time.

Exciting times for Northern Oak- in two weeks we’ll be heading back into the studio (Redfern Studios in Sheffield) to record a new EP, consisting of three songs for three of our Kickstarter backers who helped to make Of Roots and Flesh a reality with their incredibly generous pledges. We’re eager to get started- we’ve been honing these songs for a while and we’re really looking forward to getting them recorded. They’re all very different (to reflect the different requests that each of the backers had for the subject matter of their song) but we’re happy that they’re all excellent Northern Oak songs!

We don’t yet have a name for the EP, but since we’re feeling generous, here are the song titles (in no particular order):

Ellan VanninThe Court of OwlsA Portrait

After the recording, we’re also looking forward to this year’s Beermageddon Festival– we’re playing on the Saturday afternoon. It’s shaping up to be another fantastic year for Beermageddon (they’ve recently announced that the festival is SOLD OUT) and we’re really looking forward to putting on a great show for everybody there! Then, the day after our set at Beermageddon, we’ll be heading up to Chester to do another set at this year’s Out of the Ashes Festival, which we last played in 2013. It’s going to be a busy bank holiday weekend for us!

Keep your eyes peeled for more news on the EP as we complete the recording (video updates galore!) and we hope to see plenty of you on the road!

In case you haven’t been keeping an eye on our Facebook page, we recently revealed a lyrics video for one of the new songs off our forthcoming album, ‘Of Roots and Flesh’. Cast your eyes downwards to check out the video, and head over to our Bandcamp page to listen to two other songs and pre-order the album now!

Earlier today, we unveiled the cover artwork for Of Roots and Flesh, our third album (recently recorded at Skyhammer Studios) through our Facebook page. The cover (and the rest of the CD layout and design) was completed by a good friend of ours, Sheffield-based artist Augustinas Naslenas, and he’s done an absolutely incredible job in bringing our vision to life. We can’t wait for you to see the rest of the packaging, this is definitely our most beautiful album yet!
Without further ado, here’s the front and back cover (minus the tracklisting):

We’ve done some more tweaking of the website- we think you’ll all agree that it looks a lot shinier, and we’ve also uploaded all the galleries that were on the site previously, as well as the pictures from our newest photoshoot with the stunning Manadh Photography. We’ll still be making changes here and there as we go along, but for now check it out and let us know what you think! There are comments boxes all over the site so you can tell us your thoughts.

We’ve also had more progress on the album artwork- it’s going well, and the cover is shaping up to look absolutely amazing, so hopefully we’ll be able to reveal that to you all soon. For those of you who backed us on Kickstarter, we’ll also be getting the design for the tshirts done once the album artwork is sorted, so once it’s finished we’ll be able to send out all the surveys to get your sizes and make sure we have everything we need to send you your rewards. Our artist Augustus Naslenas is hard at work, and we’re sure the results are going to blow you all away!

Thank you for your patience – as you can see, our website redesign is now done, thanks to the hard work of Katie Sutton!

We’ll still be adding things and shining the site up as we go forward, and there’ll undoubtedly be some visual changes as we get the artwork sorted for the new album, but it looks a lot snappier than it did before.

If you aren’t one of the excellent people who backed our Kickstarter campaign to fund the new album, but you’d still like to hear how the songs sound now that we’ve recorded them… you’re in luck! We’ve recently put together a short teaser video featuring snippets of three songs from the album and some photos from the recording taken by the talented Katie Sutton.

The tracks are ‘Taken’ (which we’ve never played live, so it’s brand new!), ‘Marston Moor’ and ‘Only Our Names Will Remain’. Take a look at the video and let us know what you think!

It’s been a long time since we updated this page, and for that we apologise- things have moved very quickly since the end of the Kickstarter campaign, and taking a bit of a break over Christmas didn’t help. Nevertheless, we’ve been updating away on our Facebook page- if you’re not following us on there (and why not?) here’s a summary!

The Kickstarter campaign was a rousing success- we raised £659 more than our target and were blown away by the generosity and kindness of everybody who pledged and everybody who spread the word.

The Astral Chaos Tour that we launched to support the campaign was also great fun- we got to play some great shows and hang out with the excellent lads in Eibon la Furies, which was a delight as always.

A couple of weeks ago, we entered the hallowed halls of Skyhammer Studio in Cheshire to begin recording the album- and as of today, we’ve had the first rough mix back. It’s sounding absolutely incredible, and we can’t wait to unleash it upon you all! We’ll be putting up a few teasers on the Kickstarter page and on our Facebook, so keep your eyes and ears peeled for those.

As you can see, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy! Now that the album is recorded, we intend to keep at it- our next step is to sort out some amazing artwork that matches the quality of the songs on the record. We’re hard at work on that, and again will be keeping you all updated every step of the way!